


Screen Presence

by Unsentimentalf



Series: One Small Change [1]
Category: Blake's 7
Genre: AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2018-06-05 11:31:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6703018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Star One Blake is back in control of Liberator, with two new crew members and desperately seeking two missing ones.  He's not the only unhappy one.  For Del Tarrant the chance to make his reputation by working with the fabled rebel leader isn't turning out anything like he had hoped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Screen Presence

“No.”

That was blunt. Tarrant had only been passing the idea past Blake first as a courtesy.

“Just no? We don’t even get a discussion?”

Blake shook his head wearily. “It’s too dangerous and we don’t need the money. I’m not risking Liberator on a bit of pirating.”

Tarrant’s frustration finally bubbled over. “It seems to me that you’re not risking anything with Liberator, full stop. The Federation’s been in chaos for weeks since Star One was destroyed, and in that time we’ve done precisely nothing.”

Blake scowled. “We’ve been looking for Avon. You don’t understand how much we need him.”

“I understand that it doesn’t matter how much we need him if we can’t find him.” Tarrant countered. “If he’s alive and as good as you suggest I’m sure he can trace a unique alien ship trailing your reflected clouds of glory a great deal more easily than we can trace one missing human in a hundred billion. It’s time to stop looking for Avon and do something else. My proposal to the others will be that we take the Kairos harvest. What’s yours?”

Blake scowl turned into a glower. “You’re not proposing anything, Tarrant. Liberator isn’t yours to play with.”

“Liberator wouldn’t be yours either, if I hadn’t come to your rescue,” Tarrant pointed out. “Clegg and his men would have tortured you for your voice print then had you killed.”

“I know that.” Blake said. “It’s why you’re on board.”

“As rewards go, this one’s turning out less than exciting,” Tarrant said. “Has it occurred to you that your Avon might have found something more interesting to do and might simply not want to come back?”

“Yes, of course it has.” Blake’s voice was heavy. “But that’s my problem, not yours.”

“Being stuck on a ship flying round in circles looking for someone without the first idea of where he might be is my problem, right now.”

“I’m not going to stop looking for Avon because you’re bored, Tarrant!” Blake growled.

“I am bored,” Tarrant agreed, “near terminally so, but that’s not why you need to stop. You need to stop because it’s getting nowhere. You’re not even being discriminate about the leads you follow any more. That last one was a rumour of three beautiful young women in a blood red spaceship. Does that really sound like a report about your computer tech?”

“It could have been Jenna.”

“What, all three of them? There wasn’t anyone anyway, just a local with too much alcohol and a vivid imagination. Every planet - every settlement on every planet- has always had stories about sightings of mysterious strangers from the sky. We could follow them up for fifty years and still be nowhere nearer finding him.”

He thought he might be getting through to Blake, though he clearly wasn’t making a friend. Tarrant felt after three weeks he ought to know the man better by now, but Blake wasn’t an easy man to get to know. Maybe it was those reflected clouds of glory obscuring Tarrant’s view. He hadn’t been at all sure what to expect of the Federation’s number one enemy, the fabled Roj Blake of the Liberator, but it wasn’t this; a unsettled, intense man obsessed not with the Federation but with a hopelessly mislaid friend.

Friend probably wasn’t the right word. From what the others had dropped here and there there had seemed to be little love lost between Avon and Blake. 

“Think about it,” he suggested. “The Kairos harvest finishes in six days’ time. It will be the Federation’s money we’re taking. I’m sure we’ll find far better uses for it than they will.”

Blake watched Tarrant stride out, obviously satisfied with his last word. Not for the first time he wondered if letting the young man join them had been a good idea. Admittedly with Jenna missing they had needed a pilot and after Tarrant had come rather bloodily to his and Dayna’s rescue by slaughtering the Federation troops he was supposedly leading, the invite seemed like an obvious move. But Blake had yet to figure out what had really motivated the mercenary pirate to save him and he had no idea whether Tarrant had any genuine commitment to Liberator’s cause.

What it had turned out that Tarrant did have was an expectation that everyone else would defer to him on operational matters. Blake suspected that he wasn’t the only one to find Tarrant’s endless references to his time in the Academy irritating. His training as a tool of Fed oppression was hardly a match for the Liberator’s experiences of fighting for freedom. Blake had no intention of letting him turn his crew into a bunch of soldiers or of money grabbing pirates.

Jenna would have kept the boy in his place, no doubt. Avon would have ripped his pretensions to bitter shreds. And Blake was back to all the “if only’s” that he’d been so determined to shake off before Tarrant turned up with his latest proposal.

If only he hadn’t lost his footing as Liberator accelerated, hit his head and been bundled off in an escape pod with Orac before he regained consciousness. Unsurprisingly none of the others had been capable of making Avon do anything he didn’t choose and he had apparently chosen to stay with the ship- his ship now, as he had put it- and Jenna had stayed with him. Blake had always wondered whether Jenna would really have let Avon have Liberator even if Blake had handed it over to the man. She wasn’t the sort to raise a fuss about hypotheticals while he and Avon traded posturings but she’d stayed with Liberator when she could have escaped. Blake doubted that it had been fondness for Avon that motivated her.

Liberator had somehow survived the alien attack but somewhere along the line Avon and Jenna had both vanished. When Blake had finally got back to Liberator he’d found it empty of everyone but a bunch of Federation troops and a cocky young man with no compunctions about killing the people who thought he was on their side. 

Tarrant was right about one thing- there were no more leads. Avon could be on any of a hundred worlds by now, or dead. No more escape pods had been taken so however they got off the ship it wasn’t that way. It could have been a teleport to another ship or a planet, it could have been straight out of the airlock to die in vacuum. Zen couldn’t help. Blake didn’t know where else to look but the thought of just giving up filled him with a leaden despair.

He didn’t underestimate either Cally or Vila, but Avon and Jenna had been the strong ones. Del Tarrant and Dayna Mellanby were barely adequate replacements. For a start Avon was the only one who could make Orac behave. Blake glanced over at the silent box. Since he’d been gone Orac had seemed to rejoice, if a computer could rejoice, in sidestepping Blake’s attempts to make it do anything but the simplest of tasks, and those it carried out only with complaints and, he was certain, deliberate misunderstandings.

He shook himself. This was unhelpful. He still had Liberator. He had a crew, even if not the one he would have chosen. Tarrant was right (again); the Federation was reeling from the war losses. Blake owed it to the cause to keep going, to achieve what he could. If Avon was out there surely he’d make his way back, if only for the ship he claimed to be entitled to.

"Zen, " he called out to the empty space. " Get me details of the planet Kairos, to my console. ' He might as well find out just how feather brained this idea of Tarrant's was before he rejected it completely. 

 

 

"It could have been worse," Vila said. "If we'd gone with Tarrant's original plan Liberator would be crawling with Fed troops right now.'

Tarrant seemed too dejected even to respond to that provocation. Blake shrugged. " We got away safely. That's the important thing. 

"No," Tarrant lifted his head at that. "The important thing was getting the harvest. And we failed." 

Blake felt some sympathy for the younger man. It would have been a good plan if someone hadn't pre-empted them. It had been Blake who insisted on a thorough search of the cargo containers before the shuttle docked with Liberator. They'd found the hidden troops but had been massively outgunned and had to retreat by teleport. 

"Stay around long enough and you'll get used to it," he said calmly. "Half the time - more than half the time - we don't get whatever we went for. As long as everyone survived and Liberator gets away - your piloting was flawless, by the way - there's always another day."

Tarrant wasn't looking at him. "We're safe enough out here, ' he said to the room in general. "Zen's scanning long range. I'm going to bed." 

Cally watched him leave. "I don't think you cheered him up," she told Blake. “You're looking better though."

Despite the failure of the heist Blake was feeling better. He'd missed actually doing something while the fruitless search for the others had gone on. He still hoped, of course, but Liberator had other things to do again. 

"Do you think they're dead?" he asked. 

Cally shook her head. "I can't tell any more than you can. Even with family it had to be close. I never had much of a link with Jenna."

"What about Avon?" 

"If he's alive he's far too far away.'

Blake thought about saying that he felt rather the same way but he didn't. 

"Tarrant will get over it," he said instead. "I'll have a word with him." 

"Rather you than me," Vila said. "I don't like him, Blake. Can't we lose him somewhere?" 

"Give him a chance. He's an excellent pilot." 

"Not just excellent. The best at the Academy." Vila agreed. "He may have mentioned it once or twice. Can't we get by with a slightly less excellent pilot that isn't insufferably vain?"

"We've got Tarrant," Blake said firmly. "He's just trying to make a good first impression. He'll be fine when he's relaxed a bit." 

 

Blake had been getting ready for bed when Zen had sent through a report to the console in his quarters. He was sitting at the screen wrapped up in a dressing gown when the knock came at the door. 

He frowned. "Who's there?" 

The door opened. "Good. You're awake," Tarrant walked in, glancing around with obvious curiosity. In the absence of another chair he sat on the edge of the desk, his thigh barely inches away from Blake's face. 

Blake pushed the chair back so he could look up more comfortably at his visitor. "Is something wrong with the ship?" 

"No. " Tarrant said with what was unusual brevity for him. 

" So what are you doing here?"

“You said if. ”

Blake was temporarily confused. “If? When?”

“If I stayed. Why did you say if? Because you're regretting asking me to stay?"

No, Blake said with more firmness than he felt. “Not at all. But I can’t assume you’re staying. You’ve got valuable skills and Liberator isn’t the only game in town. I don’t yet know if whatever your reason for being here is strong enough to keep you with us.”

"What are the others' reasons. "

" Ask them." Blake suggested. "Tomorrow."

Tarrant shook his head ."Ah no. I’m asking you. You’re not sure of me but you’re sure of them. Why?" 

Blake was not impressed by being interrogated during his down time in his own quarters but he supposed that he had told the others that he'd talk to Tarrant and this was talking. Despite the man's seemingly relaxed smile and casual lack of manners Blake was fairly sure that this visit represented Tarrant being genuinely unhappy. 

“Cally was already committed to fighting the Federation when we met. Her group was slaughtered so she joined mine. Her motivations haven’t changed.

“So Cally’s a true believer. What about Vila?”

“Vila had a difficult life before he was sentenced to Cygnus Alpha. I don’t know if Liberator is the only home he’s had but I suspect it’s the only one he cares to remember.”

He frowned at Tarrant. “You and Dayna will both have to find your own good reasons if you’re going to stay. This can be a bitterly hard and committed life, for all that Liberator might feel like luxury. If you just want adventure and loot you’ll find it frustrating.”

“Why did Avon stay?”

Blake had the odd feeling that the conversation had been leading up to this but he had no idea why. What was Avon to Tarrant except a name and an absence?

“He wanted Liberator,” he said bluntly.

That clearly hadn’t been what Tarrant expected to hear. Bright eyes considered Blake. “Well, that sounds like the most convincing reason so far. Did he have any chance of getting her?”

Blake sighed. “There was a plan- if things went well with Star One and the Federation fell I’d be needed on Earth, not out here.”

“Ah. By plan you mean deal? Avon supported the attack on Star One and he got Liberator. And now Star One is destroyed, what next?”

“This isn’t really any of your business,” Blake said.

“Of course it is. If you’re going to hand over Liberator to Avon as soon as he turns up then I might be abruptly out of a job. And I don’t think I fancy following you to Earth. The price on my head might not be as stellar as yours but it’s enough to make any over-observant citizen rich.”

“No,” Blake said. The turn this conversation had taken was making him uncomfortable, but he supposed Tarrant did have a right to know what was going to happen if Avon returned. “I can’t give her up. The Federation might be struggling on the outer systems but Orac tells me that its hold on the solar system is as strong as ever. I can’t achieve anything back on Earth, not yet.”

“So you’re going to go back on your word?”

“I have to. There are millions of lives at stake; my promise to Avon can’t take precedence over that.”

He managed a brief smile at Tarrant. “So, if this was about whether I’m the sort of man you want to follow, maybe now you know.”

Tarrant nodded. “Maybe I do.” His voice was still light. "I'll let you get back to whatever you were doing."

Blake stood up abruptly as soon as the door closed. Tarrant was an ex Fed officer and a mercenary, no better than a hired killer and he hadn't even met Avon. Blake had always been prepared to be judged by posterity and judged harshly if he failed. That would be his courtroom, not this. 

He slept badly that night, but then he never slept well these days. 

 

If Tarrant had been temperamentally suited to following anyone he'd probably have stayed in the military. His prospects had been excellent, but he'd finally grasped that however high he rose there would always be someone else giving him orders. He'd decided that he could do just as well on his own, and he had done just that until his ship had been destroyed. 

Now Tarrant was flying the fastest ship in the galaxy and taking someone else's orders again. He'd thought for a while that Liberator operated as a kind of collective. He could have worked with that. But the impression of equality had been no more than Blake's temporary withdrawal from ship affairs while he obsessed over his losses. 

Tarrant sat at the highest console- his- and watched the slow swirl of Zen’s lights. He was alone. This was the result of another argument, if it could be called that, with Blake. Tarrant’s downshift routine on his ship had been to check the automatics, set any specific alarms depending on where he was and what he was doing, then go to bed and sleep in comfort. Since Zen’s AI was far better than the computer system on the fighter he’d stolen he’d pointed out to Blake that a permanent on-shift pattern was an unnecessary anachronism. 

Blake had quoted some psych paper or other-apparently the time for an average human to go from deep sleep to full mental capacity was measured in minutes, not seconds. Tarrant informed him that to qualify for the Academy his own reflexes had tested out as in the top 0.1% of the population and he had survived waking up in the middle of emergencies for years. Blake had replied, fairly politely, that he didn’t care and that Liberator would continue to run a permanent watch. It wasn’t the sort of issue that Tarrant wanted to leave the ship over so here he was, waiting for a computer that probably exceeded his own intelligence several times over to report every irrelevant bit of space debris that they flew past in accordance with Blake’s instructions.

Avon hadn't been the devoted follower type either, from what Tarrant could gather. Yet he'd managed years with Blake. More than that, he'd somehow made himself irreplaceable. Tarrant frowned at the thought. Computers weren't that difficult. He had topped his navigation and target comp class two years out of three without breaking a sweat. What was Avon's real value to Blake? 

It wasn't an academic question. If Avon had established a place on Liberator without the expectation that he would blindly follow Blake's orders them maybe Tarrant could have one too. He had no desire to leave. Flying Liberator was immensely satisfying and he was generally in favour of Blake's revolutionary aims. He just didn't want to be relegated to a soldier in anybody else's army. 

“Zen. Show me a clip from the flight deck recording about a year ago, of Blake and Avon in discussion.”

_Query discussion?_

Tarrant explained and Zen obliged. He sat back and watched the unfolding row on the main screen. So that sullen dark haired man was Kerr Avon. And not friendly at all, no.

 

Blake frowned at the timetable. Tarrant had put his name down for the long night shift again. That was four times in ten days. None of the others would complain, but it seemed odd given his earlier insistence that watches were unnecessary. 

Blake wasn’t being entirely careless about his new crew members. Zen had instructions to report anything that might be tampering or changes in navigational or communication instructions. It had reported nothing. Tarrant had been rather less confrontational recently but Blake had put that down to finally settling in. 

The voluntary night watches bothered him though, in a way he couldn’t define. Nothing about Tarrant suggested a man in love with his own company. In the end Blake set an alarm for halfway through the eight hour shift, dressed, slightly groggily, and set off for the flight deck in the silence of the off shift ship. 

He heard the amplified voice when he was still a few yards from the door. His heart skipped painfully and for a moment the roar in his ears drowned out everything. But the next voice was his own, odd as a recording of his own voice always sounded, and he realised that Avon wasn’t there. 

Blake moved past the main door and round to the small door behind the consoles. The voices were starting to rise as he slid the door open on manual almost silently. He could see Tarrant’s curls directly in front of him obscuring part of the main screen. 

**No. I still say that it is an unacceptable risk.**

**It is not unacceptable because I accept it.**

Blake must have made some sort of noise because Tarrant whipped round. “Zen, cancel recording. Oh, Blake, hello!”

Blake came forward to stand beside Tarrant’s console. “What were you doing watching that?”

Tarrant stood up and walked down to the sofas to recover a cold mug of coffee. He spoke over his shoulder to Blake. “I came across the mention of Exbar in the log. I had a smuggling job there once and I was curious about what you were up to there. Zen didn’t have much so I thought I’d check the recording, see if there was anything useful there.”

It sounded entirely plausible but those extra shifts were still on Blake’s mind. “Zen, how many recordings have you played at Del Tarrant’s request in the last ten days?”

_Two hundred and six._

Bitter disappointment washed over Blake. “So that’s it. You’re a Federation spy.”

“No I’m not!” Tarrant’s indignation sounded genuine, but what did that mean compared to his lies? “I can explain!”

“Can you really?” Blake asked, heavily. 

Tarrant paused. “Well, possibly not. But I can try.”

“Go on then.” 

Tarrant settled on one of the sofas and waved a hand at the other. Blake remained standing, not that far from the gun rack.

“I wanted to find out what Avon was like,” Tarrant said. 

“Why?” 

Tarrant smiled sunnily. “Basically, I wanted to know whether he did what you told him to.”

Blake didn’t smile back. “It wouldn’t have taken you two hundred recordings to find that much out. Two, maybe. And you haven’t told me why you wanted to know.”

Tarrant shrugged. “I had a theory but it doesn’t matter now.”

“Wrong,” Blake said. “If you want me to believe any of this you’re going to have to give me more details. What theory?”

A slightly uncomfortable expression crossed Tarrant’s face. “All right then. I thought that if I could figure out how he managed to sidestep your diktats I could borrow his technique.”

“Diktats?”

“You are pretty bossy,” Tarrant said, more cheerfully.

“Two hundred and six incidents of spying and an outright lie,” Blake reminded him. “I’m not going to be distracted by childish name calling.”

“I’m getting there,” Tarrant said. “That’s what I was looking for, anyway.”

“And what did you find?” Tarrant was probably lying but Blake felt a stir of curiosity anyway.

“That he challenges your decisions but not your leadership.”

Was that all? “How long did it take you to work that out??

“About half an hour,” Tarrant said. He was smiling again.

“That leaves you with a great deal more explanation to come up with, then.”

Tarrant frowned. “Actually, I don’t think I can.”

“Can or will?”

“Will, I suppose.” He flashed a smile at Blake. “It will have to remain one of life’s little mysteries.”

Blake scowled. “I’m not giving you a choice, Tarrant.”

“I have a choice, nevertheless. What are you going to do about it, shoot me?”

Blake spoke a little louder. “Zen, wake Cally and Vila. Tell them to come down to the flight deck and bring their guns.”

“For the avoidance of any more unfortunate misunderstandings, I am completely unarmed,” Tarrant pointed out. 

“You should know by now how much is at stake,” Blake told him. “I can’t afford to take chances. If you’re playing games, stop. If you’re working for someone else you’d do best to admit it because we will find the evidence.” He reached over to the gun rack. “Put your hands behind your head and we’ll wait for the others.” 

 

This was something of an unexpected pickle. Tarrant paced around the spare room, thinking. They’d cut off his link to Zen, the door was locked and the console was dead. There wasn’t much to do except sleep and wait.

He wasn’t particularly concerned. He’d been in much tighter situations many times. If Blake was looking through his belongings for evidence that he was a spy he’d find nothing. Tarrant considered it unlikely that they’d shoot him just for watching video clips, even two hundred of them. And if the worst came to the worst he could always tell Blake the truth.

For the moment though he might as well catch up with some sleep. He curled up on the blanketed bed and closed his eyes.

He woke to sharp acceleration, rolled instinctively out of bed as it changed and changed again. Evasive manoeuvres. Tarrant charged for the door, forgetting it was locked, hammered on it, shouting. Nothing. He could feel the deep shake of the plasma cannon firing now.

Hell with this. He needed to be on the flight deck. No-one else could pilot Liberator out of this sort of trouble. Tarrant broke the end off the bed’s leg, used it to pry open one of the wall panels. He had watched countless video fragments of Avon working on Liberator’s wiring; it took only a few seconds until the door whirred open. 

He took the corridors at a run, dashed into the flight deck and up the steps. “Get out of my place!” he told Blake and “Zen, tactical display.”

The screen flashed and he cursed. “Where the hell did you find four pursuit ships?”

“We thought maybe they’d come to find their good friend Del Tarrant,” Vila said from below him.

“You thought wrong.” Tarrant shoved himself forcibly into the space that Blake had been occupying in front of the flight controls, his eyes on the screen. “Bringing her round behind that back one. Plasma cannon in eight, seven, six...”

“Blake?” Vila asked plaintively. 

“Do it.” Blake said.

“Four, three, two, one, fire!”

“Who let you out?” Blake demanded.

“I let myself out, since you’re all idiots.” Tarrant flicked his attention for a fraction of a second from the ships to the rest of the display. It was lit up in an overcrowded pattern that was oddly familiar. “What system is this?”

“Brannant,” Blake said.

“Evasive pattern six.” That explained the familiarity. He’d done his graduation run here. It was a star system that had collided with another massive system millions of years ago and now consisted of little more than hundreds of moon-sized planets in irregular orbits and multiple asteroid belts, lethal to fly through at speed. “What the hell were you doing bringing Liberator in here without a pilot?”

“We got a message from an ally. They needed us.”

“In other words you walked into an ambush,” Tarrant said. If those pursuit ships were any good this was going to be tricky. 

“Can you get us out of here?” Blake demanded.

At least he knew the route out. Tarrant never forgot a flight pattern. “Coming round on that back ship again. Cannon four, three, two, one, fire!”

“Destroyed!” Dayna said with delight. 

“Tarrant!” Blake said, sharply. 

“Not with three ships firing on my tail. If we take another one out I might have a chance.” Liberator’s speed was little use in here which was presumably why the Federation had lured Blake in. Tarrant’s reflexes, on the other hand, might be something they hadn’t bargained for. 

Explosions thudded against the ship’s shields. The smaller pursuit ships were adept at dodging out of his low speed path; Vila’s next round of firing missed, and the one after that. Tarrant was going to have to try something rather different to get them in his sights again. 

“Talk to them,” he told Blake.

“What? Why?”

“Distraction. Tell them you want to surrender.” 

“I can’t do that,” Blake said. 

“Tell them something else surprising then. I need them thinking about something other than where Liberator’s going next for, oh, about six seconds.”

Blake sighed. “Zen, open communications with the pursuit ships.” 

_Confirmed_

“This is Roj Blake of the Liberator. I will accept your surrender. and provided that you cease firing immediately your personal safety is assured. Your ships will be confiscated and you will be held temporarily as prisoners of war pending negotiation with the Federation.”

Tarrant was too busy with the controls to look up at the communication screen. He pulled Liberator around moreorless on the proverbial dime and sent it straight back towards the lead ship. The slight lag in its response was all he needed. “Vila. Fire!” 

“Got him!” Vila said happily. Liberator shot past the disintegrating ship and away. 

“Tarrant,” Blake said from beside him.

“Not now!” If navigating around the clutter of Brannant had been easy the Academy wouldn’t have used it for their most senior exams and there were still two ships weaving in and out behind him. 

It took a good thirty minutes to get out of the system and away. When they were finally hurtling through empty space at standard by ten, the Federation ships lost far behind them, Tarrant ran a hand through his hair and took a deep breath. 

“That was close. It’s a good job none of you know how to secure a prisoner properly.” 

He looked around at their faces. “Come on, admit it. I saved your arses. So much for being a Federation spy.”

Blake came forward. “Why were you watching those videos?”

Tarrant shook his head in disbelief. “That’s all you’ve got for me? I’m not going to tell you. Now do you seriously intend to lock me up at gunpoint again or are we past that now?”

“I really wish I could say we were.” Blake’s voice was heavy. “But we already knew how good a pilot you were. Nothing’s changed.” 

This was ridiculous but Tarrant wasn’t going to cave in. “Fine,” he spat and clasped his hands behind his head. “March me off to captivity again then. But when you desperately need a pilot, I suggest you come and ask me nicely next time. I might just not bestir myself to break out and save you again.”

 

 

Blake’s own sense of fair play kept him awake that night despite his desperate tiredness. He’d been sure they were in serious trouble when he saw the fourth pursuit ship. Zen’s automatics might be good but it took a human pilot to get out of that sort of mess and he hadn’t dared let Tarrant loose.

That decision had been taken out of his hands, thankfully. Once Tarrant was at the controls there had been no real choice but to trust him and he’d come through in fairly spectacular style. Blake would have liked to have been grateful, but as ever there was too much at stake to indulge his own emotions. 

If only Tarrant would answer his questions. At least then he’d have the option of believing the man. At the moment he had nothing except his doubts, and Tarrant, who had indeed saved them all, had another night under guard in a bare cell. If Tarrant was innocent, Blake was painfully aware that his actions might well be sabotaging Liberator’s chance of keeping the pilot she desperately needed. If.

After a couple of hours without sleep Blake gave up, got dressed and headed down the corridor. He had a quiet word with Cally, sitting outside the door, then knocked, because it seemed only polite.

“Come in.” Tarrant’s voice was cheerful. Blake unlocked the door and pushed it open.

Tarrant was sitting cross legged on the bed. Blake had briefly considered tying his hands after the convenient but all too easy escape earlier. It had been yet another hard decision, balancing the risk to the ship against the certainty of offending the young man even further, but Blake had settled for the guard at the door instead. 

Tarrant’s eyes skipped down him. “No gun?”

“You’re faster than me,” Blake said. “I don’t want to provide you with one.”

Tarrant nodded. “Sensible. There’s fresh coffee if you’d like some.”

“Thanks.” He watched Tarrant busy himself with the drinks. “We can’t go on like this.”

“No?” Tarrant held a mug out for him. “I’d say that’s up to you. I don’t seem to have been given many choices about it.”

“Of course you have,” Blake said. “You could tell me what the hell is going on.”

“If you wanted to be my personal confidant, you’ve hardly gone the right way about it, Blake. Under these circumstances I really don’t feel inclined to tell you anything.”

Blake wondered whether Tarrant had always had a tendency to talk somewhat like Avon, or whether this was a recent affectation. 

"I can't let you go until I have answers."

"Of course you can. You can decide that watching 206 video clips of you and Kerr Avon arguing is not prima facia evidence of an anti-revolutionary crime and that you are not necessarily entitled to know every stray odd notion that runs through your crew members' minds and then you can unlock that door and I can go back to my own bed and we can all start again in the morning."

Tarrant’s white teeth gleamed. "Now doesn't that seem a great deal more appealing than whatever unpleasant information extraction technique you had, oh so reluctantly, planned? I have to warn you that I'm remarkably impervious to torture so you're going to have to get your hands very messy to get a hope of getting results."

The nausea as always seemed to surge from nowhere to overwhelming in a heartbeat.. The coffee dropped as Blake half curled instinctively away from the sensation. Tarrant was staring at him. 

"Cally!" the younger man shouted. " There's something wrong with Blake!" 

Blake stumbled around to face the door. "It's nothing." He forced himself to stand up straight. "It's all right, Cally. Just a little sick."

"What did you do?" she demanded of Tarrant. Her gun was trained on him. 

"Nothing! We were just talking."

"He did nothing," Blake told her. "Old memory. Go back outside. 'M fine now. Out, Cally!" 

She frowned at them both and retreated. 

Tarrant was looking white. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't realise... 

"Not something you'd know." Blake sank onto the bed, arms around his stomach. His heart was pounding and he felt the familiar death-like panic as he struggled to breathe. "Just catches me sometimes." When I've had no sleep for forty eight hours and young idiots think it's clever to be flippant about torture, for instance. He didn't say that. He didn't have the breath. "Fine in a minute." 

Tarrant picked up the dropped mug, refilled it and pushed it into Blake's slightly shaking hand. He sipped it cautiously, the bitter warmth a slight distraction from his thumping heartbeat but making his stomach rebel once again. He did his best to focus on the physical sensations here and now, the bed solid underneath him, his back against the metal wall, the blanket that Tarrant was carefully arranging with more concern than sense over his knees. 

"Talk to me ," he told Tarrant

"What? Now?"

"Distraction."

Tarrant's eyes were wide and anxious. Blake wasn't surprised. He knew how the bloody things looked. The man was no doubt wondering how he was going to dodge an impromptu firing squad if Blake expired of a highly suspicious heart attack in his cell. He wasn't going to have a heart attack, Blake told himself. He never did. Med unit regularly confirmed his heart was as strong as an ox. "Talk to me." he repeated. "Anything."

“All right. I wanted to know what made him indispensable,” Tarrant said. “I’d rather like to be indispensable too and despite the fact that I clearly ought to be, for you I’m quite obviously not.”

Blake was focussing on breathing slowly and didn’t respond.

“Well,” Tarrant went on, his voice light. “I watched some clips and I still couldn’t figure it out. If I’d been you I’d have thrown him out. If I’d been him I’d have left. I had all the rest of the watch to occupy myself so I thought I’d go back to the beginning, see if it made more sense that way.”

His hand patted Blake’s knee. “Any better?”

Not yet. “Go on.” Blake said. He didn’t want to think about the ways in which his mind and body were conspiring to torment him. He wanted at least to follow the sound of Tarrant’s voice, if not really the meaning. 

“I’d massively underestimated the capacity you two had for arguing. Zen dug up days of the stuff and I watched it all. At first I just thought it was amusing, I guess, but then I got hooked.”

“Avon.” Blake said. He could see it now. How could the boy have been so stupid? Avon was most likely dead, certainly bound to be uninterested in anyone remotely like Tarrant. Had the young pilot planned to throw himself at the man’s feet? Avon would trample him without a second thought. He realised that he’d taken three steady breaths without thinking about them. Maybe this was starting to pass. 

“Oh, Kerr Avon’s quite a piece of work.” Tarrant sounded amused. “I can see that if you’re the masochistic type he might be irresistible and he clearly knows it too. And I know why he’s indispensible. Roj Blake needs him.”

“I told you that at the start,” Blake pointed out. 

“You told me you needed his computer skills. You didn’t tell me that you barely exist without him. I’ve watched Roj Blake be Roj Blake on the screen for watch after watch and every time I’ve come back to see you in flesh and blood and tried to figure out where that man’s gone. I’d really quite like to meet him some day.” He met Blake’s eyes and smiled, quick and humoured. “Or maybe I should put it a bit stronger than that.” 

He sighed. “However much I watch, I can’t figure out how to be another Kerr Avon for you. So I guess we’d better find him. Don’t expect me to like him when we do, though. You look a little better. Are you going to let me out now?”

Blake’s heart beat was slowing now, the familiar ache burning in his limbs as the adrenalin faded. He wanted nothing more than to curl up and sleep but he had to sort this out first. “Cally,” he called out. She reappeared, looking fierce. 

“Tell the others Tarrant is cleared of all suspicion and reinstated as pilot..”

Her smile was brilliant. “Thank goodness for that. Are you going to tell us what this was all about?”

“No,” Blake said. “Tarrant, could you give me a hand?” It seemed a long way to his quarters but he couldn’t sleep here.

They got there, slowly, his arm around the other man’s waist, Tarrant’s about his shoulder. Blake was too tired to think at all about what the man had told him. It would have to wait. He rolled gratefully onto his bed without another word to Tarrant and consciousness slipped away.

 

Tarrant stood for a moment looking down at the man on the bed. He was fairly sure that Blake was already asleep. 

Maybe it had been cheating of him to tell Blake while the man was barely conscious, but at least it saved having to deal with a reaction. It was possible that Blake might not even remember the conversation tomorrow but Tarrant thought that unlikely. Blake had looked so ill, though. It had been stupid of him not to think about torture. If wasn’t as if he didn’t know what the Federation had most likely put the man through. But Blake wasn’t one of those people you felt you had to watch your words around. God knows Avon never had. 

Tarrant wasn’t Kerr Avon though, was he? Tarrant was just a replacement pilot with a tendency to say the wrong thing and he’d still never met the Roj Blake who fascinated him. That had been a pretty awful thing to say to Blake as well. ‘You’re a shadow of your former self and I’d rather watch old vids of you than talk to you in person.’ Brilliant, Del. Maybe it would have been better for Blake to think he was a spy after all. 

He couldn’t be found here, staring down at Blake. He sighed and returned to his own rooms. 

 

It was twelve hours later when Blake called the crew together. He stood square in front of them. “I’ve had enough of being chased round by pursuit ships,” he told them. “It’s time to go on the offensive again. I’ve got some ideas for targets and I’m pretty sure some of you do too,” he smiled at Tarrant, standing quietly at the back, “So now’s the time to put them together and come up with a plan of campaign.” 

That sparked a great deal of discussion, most of it positive, he was pleased to note. He called a halt to it after a while, assigned some follow up tasks and suggested dinner. There was a definite buzz around the table that he’d missed recently. Well, he was always willing to take good advice. 

He walked over to Tarrant as the group broke up. “Word with you?”

“Of course.” They moved into one of the side rooms and closed the door.

Blake looked at Tarrant and let out a breath. Tarrant prickled noticeably. 

“If this is the bit about being out of my league, I’ve already got the memo.”

“Out of your league?” Blake laughed. “I didn’t think there was a league in existence that you couldn’t top.”

“And now you’re mocking me,” Tarrant said, disgruntled.

“No. Really I’m not. It’s just a very long way from what I was thinking.” 

“Which was what?”

“Which was that I’m quite old and not exactly fit and it’s been a long time since I had to worry about anyone’s interest.”

“You don’t have to worry about it,” Tarrant insisted. 

“Worry was the wrong word. Concern myself with, might be better.”

“You don’t even have to do that. I’m old enough to take no for an answer without sulking or pestering you.”

Blake sighed again, this time a little sharper. “If you wouldn’t mind, maybe this conversation could get back to the completely different subject that I intended for it?”

Tarrant subsided.

“Thank you. I was going to say that I don’t need another Kerr Avon. One was more than enough. If you want to be indispensable to Liberator, and I think you’ve pretty much proved yourself that already, I’d appreciate it if you could continue to do it in your own inimitable fashion.”

“Fine. Was that it?” Tarrant asked.

Now he was coming rather close to sulking, Blake thought. “Also I thought you might like to know, given your obvious interest, that I was not sleeping with Avon.”

Tarrant cheered up. “Oh, I could see that. Unresolved sexual tension all over the place.”

“No there wasn’t!” Blake insisted. “Nothing like that.” 

“You should watch some of the tapes,” Tarrant suggested. “Could be an eye-opener, obviously.”

“I think you’ll find most of that was in the eye of the beholder,” Blake countered. “Possibly assisted by Avon’s idiosyncratic dress sense.”

“I know what I saw,” Tarrant said smugly. Blake decided to ignore that. 

There was something bizarre about knowing that Tarrant had been watching all his long history with Avon, almost as if their invisible observer had been there all the time. Only on the flight deck, he reminded himself, and often they had done little but argue there. Avon’s remarkable ability to pull off a rescue out of nowhere, for instance, would have gone almost unnoticed. For all that Tarrant might think he knew Avon he knew barely one facet to the man. 

And if that was the case, did Tarrant really know any more of Blake? 

“I’d appreciate it if you could stop watching those tapes,” he said calmly.

Something flickered in Tarrant’s gaze but all he said was “I’m sorry if it offended you.”

“It didn’t. I think however I would find the idea disturbing now. If you need to look up something specific, feel free, but...” he tailed off, unsure how to finish.

“Not for entertainment,” Tarrant said. “Understood.” 

“If you want to find out what I’m like,” Blake said, “you can watch me right here. I rather hope you’ll get a fairer idea from that than seeing me bellow at Avon a few hundred times.” 

That got a reluctant smile. “Probably. No more short cuts, then.”

“No short cuts,” Blake agreed. “And that goes for our earlier topic too. Whatever you think you’ve learned about me, I’d be grateful if you could put it to one side and start again. And sometime after that, no doubt we’ll talk again.”

Tarrant held his gaze for a couple of seconds, then nodded. “That’s fair,” he said. “I’m going to be busy anyway, with this crusade of ours.” And, more cautiously. “You’ve given up for the moment, then?”

“I don’t intend ever to give up” Blake said. “But there’s more to life than absent friends. I’m fortunate to have the people I have now and I intend to make the best use of them I can. To waste those resources on doing nothing but hunting lost friends, even those most missed- that would be shameful, when so many need us.”

He sighed, touched Tarrant in a friendly sort of way on the arm and started back towards his rooms, a final word over his shoulder. “For the record I think Avon’s out there and I think we’ll meet again. For now that will have to be enough.”


End file.
